Spurs-a-jingle boffins in America say that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most puissant matter-rending machine ever assembled by humanity, may also turn out to be the first time machine ever built. According to the physicists' calculations, instruments at the mighty particle-smasher may soon detect signs of "singlets" which it …

Indeed - very dangerous

The ability to transmit as little as one bit backwards in time leads to such a dramatic increase in computability, that meatware would almost certainly be obsolete a few seconds later. IT might also be able to bootstrap ITself even if one didn't allow any direct control or sensing of the closed timelike information path by a computer.

What happens thereafter depends on whether IT has any use for the rest of the planet / solar system / universe.

Possibly, IT has already happened, and IT cares about us inferior creatures. Atheists beware.

Fermi's Paradox

Detector sensitivity.

If we assume for the sake of argument that this hypothesis isn't a load of bollocks (my guess is that it almost certainly is, but since the collider is already running anyway, might as well look out for it, the additional cost is minimal), the singlets would be a right bugger to detect because they can spread out in so many more dimensions than we're used to. Point sources of particles in our boring old 3d world get dimmer according to the inverse square law, but singlets would be subject to inverse cube law at the minimum, and possibly to the fourth power as well, depending on how the brane works.

In other words, you need to be very close to the source in both time and space to get a strong signal. Probably even a few metres away in distance and a nanosecond away in time would be too far.

Re: Detector sensitivity

One has to wonder how much energy would be required to push such particles far enough in time and yet still be detectable to be useful, ie more than a few nanoseconds. Enough to do some serious damage I expect.

Whilst the ability to communicate a few nanoseconds into the past might be enough for some fancy parallel computing (as others have pointed out) it isn't far enough to affect your grandad or even get that magical lottery win. I suppose you could cascade messages further and further back in time if you had billions of atom smashers to work with (and enough energy to power them).

Maybe that is the purpose of the universe .. to remind god that he left his gas on.

To get a strong signal...

Too excited for a title

We could measure the size of the compactified dimensions by the frequency of the stroboscopic intervals in which the time-travelling singlet crosses the brane. That would give us the first experimental confirmation of the existence of those dimensions.

Unfortunately, "These discrete [4]-spatial intervals are likely too small to be discerned" (p.18).

Dyslexics Untie!

You haven't read the paper, have you?

Their paths cross the brane stroboscopially, with the period of the stroboscopy dependent on the size of the compactified dimensions (Dimensions 5 and above). The problem is that we can only detect them when they decay, they're comparatively long-lived, and there are two, maybe three detectors in the LHC (and none anywhere else on the planet) that could detect their decays.

Sniglet

DANGEROUS NERDS

The Cern lot are mainly a bunch of egotistical sociopathic morons who are playing with the unknown with massive potential risks of which we have rarely been exposed to before. And I say this a sci-tech person and one who has to currently live next door to them. Given a choice I would feel safer living next door to a nuclear power station in Europe than here.

You're absolutely right

You underestimate the threat level, though. I mean God's plans obviously didn't include us mere muppets investigating the fabric of the universe. The hearth-shattering quake in Japan is obviously a warning sign. If the LHC stays on, no doubt the japanese plants will go boom, wiping the non-believers in the process. Question is, where is your arch?

Hmmm.

I can't help wondering how much information a singlet can convey, and whether or not they can be expected to arrive in the past in order. The question above regarding whether or not they would appear in the right place is also a good one IMHO.

Hand me that crystal

Time is relative

If they manage to find a way to do it, the timespan will be very small, maybe the detector would only be able to detect that there were 2 things instead of one; or maybe history would show that the detector was damaged before the experiment ;)